Suffolk County girls’ championship: Shoreham-Wading River wins Class C title with 11-7 win over Mt. Sinai

Shannon Rosati had three goals and an assist and Alex Fehmel tallied three goals while Lauren Daly made 15 saves to lift Shoreham-Wading River to an 11-7 victory today over Mt. Sinai for the Suffolk county girls’ class C championship at Adelphi University.

Shoreham-Wading River celbrates Suffolk County championship (Photo by Gene Morris)

The Wildcats (14-3) will face Nassau county champion North Shore in the Class C Long Island Championship Saturday at Dowling at noon.

Shoreham-Wading River was locked in a 4-4 tie early in the second half. From that point forward, the Mustangs (13-5) seemed to sputter while the Wildcats stepped on the gas. Shoreham-Wading River scored six consecutive goals over a 6:14 span to take command of the game. The barrage was capped by a Jessica Angerman goal with 14:28 left.

“People were saying that we were unlucky because we didn’t get a semifinal game and (we were off for) 21 days,” Wildcats head coach Mary Bergmann said. “But we worked on conditioning like no other in that first week that we had off.

“I think that you can see in the game that it really made a difference because Mt. Sinai doesn’t sub that much and we knew that. Coming into a hot game being conditioned and having four midfielders rotating in three spots was going to help us with the speed.”

The Wildcats used a balanced offensive attack – including two goals and an assist from Katie Boden – to punch its ticket back to the Long Island championship game after a brief reprieve in 2011.

“Our goal was to extend our season three more days,” Bergmann said. “We know we’re playing North Shore so we’ll start planning for that over the next couple of days.”

SWR's Shannon Rosati is defended during Thursday's title win (Photo by Gene Morris)

“You can tell by the way we played today – we don’t cut off individual players – we play a team defense and I think that’s why we’ve been so successful the whole season,” Bergmann said. “We don’t just pinpoint individual players, we play a team defense and make it difficult because they have to play like a team on attack in order to score goals against us.”

And even when a team is able to break through the defense they still have to get the ball past Daly. The freshman goaltender was awarded the game ball by her head coach for her 15 saves.

“I just knew I had to make the save and when the time came I just saw the ball well,” Daly said. “Mt. Sinai’s a great team and has a lot of good players and a lot of players I look up to.”

It was a year of transition for the Wildcats coming back down to Class C. While Bergmann mentioned after the game that there have been whispers of the school re-classifying up to B in a few years, for now the focus is on this season and its successes.

“Coming back down to C we wanted to prove to people – especially the Mt. Sinai group that we lost to (8-5) during the season – that we’re a competitive teams,” she said.